Embodiments of the present subject matter relate to the field of storage systems. More particularly, embodiments of the present subject matter relate to de-duplication (de-dup) of data blocks on a virtualized storage array.
Data de-dup refers to comparing data blocks and removing duplicate data blocks to free up space in storage systems. Typically, de-dup is performed either at a file level or at a block level. Most of the storage vendors provide a host-based and/or an appliance based de-dup solutions. These solutions require additional hardware or appliance like data domain, or very specialized software like a specialized file system with additional de-dup aware business logic to perform the de-dup. Addition of these hardware components or appliance into a storage area network fabric for performing the de-dup requires a very high processing power for identifying duplicate data blocks in a data stream and may also need a physical location for storing a unique copy of each duplicate data block. Further, the new hardware or software component in the storage system may need to be configured and can require maintenance and support. This may result in an increased expense and complexity in the storage system.